


that one coffeeshop au

by skyjacklegion



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Gen, M/M, warning: coffee
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 04:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/474692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyjacklegion/pseuds/skyjacklegion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shaun's working on his thesis, Desmond's slinging coffee and Lucy's had enough of their shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The first

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elenilote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elenilote/gifts).



> For elenilote on tumblr. <3

Shaun’s very particular about his coffee. He’s spending so much time on his thesis he’s barely able to keep his eyes open without a mug the size of his head, and he’s also pretty sure his glasses have worn a groove into his face that’ll be there forever, so when he takes them off and peers at his decidedly empty mug, he feels something like pain stirring in his chest.  
  
He doesn’t whine. History majors do not  whine . What they do is look over at the counter of the coffee shop with something like forlorn hope until Lucy notices and makes them another coffee. Only Lucy is busy training the new guy and it’s seven in the morning, just before the huge rush and fuck, he’s been sitting there for half an hour (since opening) with an empty page in front of him and the previous fifty pages glowering at him, the one thread of reason completely missing from his entire opening statement.  
  
“Just who do I have to fuck to get more coffee around here?” He’s tired, snappish and Rebecca cracks up, her eyes crinkling at the edges as she smiles. She flicks her hair at him and yeah, he still had that stupid crush on her /somewhere/ but that’d been replaced with a desire to inhale anything that contained the smallest amount of caffeine.  
  
It was the new guy that speaks up, eyebrow raised.  
  
“You could get up and order one.”  
  
“You must be new.” Shaun can’t stop his mouth from running away with him which he sort of hates, because the new guy is rather attractive, in that “I totally get into a lot of barfights look I have my sleeve rolled up to show off my tattoo” sort of way.  
  
“How’d you guess?” The new guy snorts at him, the hood of his jacket bunching around his shoulders as he reaches over to grab the milk. That is, Shaun decides in a haze of tired, angry, thesis-driven rage, entirely unfair.   
  
“It was somewhere between the look of doe-eyed stupidity and your utter ignorance on the matter of my morning coffee.”   
  
Lucy starts to laugh and Shaun goes a little pink around the ears but absolutely refuses to apologise. He gathers his things and shoves his coffee mug into his bag, the ceramic scraping against the side of his laptop.   
  
Lucy’s laughter follows him out of  Roma  and he doesn’t go back for three days.  
  
—-  
  
The thing is, the new guy is always working. ALWAYS. Every time Shaun heads in there he’s up to his elbows in foam and he makes a point of getting Rebecca or Lucy to make his coffee, because they’re the best at it and the only ones who know how to handle his temper. He knows he has one, and he knows it  needs handling but he heads on on Thursday and Rebecca and Lucy aren’t  there.   
  
“Cappuccino. One sugar, try not to fuck it up.”  
  
The new guy takes his money with a smirk, stamps his card and shrugs. “Aren’t you brits supposed to drink tea?”  
  
“Shut your lying heathen mouth.” Shaun’s moving back to the table and his laptop before he finishes speaking, and he waves a hand dramatically as he flops into his seat. “I’m writing my thesis, for fuck’s sake.”  
  
Roma’s busier than usual. It must have something to do with the way the new guy rolls his shoulders as he grinds out another shot of coffee, or the clink of the wristband on his arm as he moves the steam wand out of the way.  It’s completely misleading, because the man is a malingering malcontent, as evidenced by his staunch refusal to say Shaun’s name as he finishes his coffee. Instead, he waves a hand at him, leaves it on the edge of the counter and goes back to work.  
  
Arsehole.  He gets up with more dignity than he thought he’d possessed and puts the sugar in the coffee himself, leaving the spoon on the counter in protest.  
  
It’s the little things that brighten his day.  
  
—-  
  
Friday and he’s so tired he can barely see straight. New guy doesn’t bother messing with him and instead puts his coffee in his hand first thing, sugar layered both in the coffee and on top of the foam and the noise Shaun makes into the lid is something close to orgasmic.  
  
“Rough week?” Lucy asks, tying her hair back with a spare lacky and knocking the cupboard shut with a hip. If he went for women (he’d tried, but he and Rebecca just hasn’t worked out, what with him liking dick and all) he’d have followed the line of her hips with his eyes. New guy did, but looked away quickly. Hah.   
  
“I’m bequeathing you my laptop if I die.” He’s only half joking, and Lucy forcefeeds him a cookie and sends him off to his corner, the table having been helpfully labelled in scratchy writing he doesn’t recognise as “British asshat’s seat, don’t sit here”.  
  
“Funny.”  
  
“I thought so.” Rebecca smiles at him, waggles her fingers and he flips her off, which makes the new guy smirk and go back to his machine.   
  
He’s kind of jealous over how well they work together. He’s alienated almost everyone in his life by sheer force of his personality and it’d be nice, he thinks, to have someone who was easy to be with like that. Someone he could bitch at and have listen, instead of shove things in his mouth and make him go away.  
  
Considering how his last three boyfriends had gone, that description was far more accurate than he’d like.  
  
—-  
  
“Where’s new guy?”  
  
“He has a name, Shaun. A name, and a day off.” Lucy sighs at him, a long suffering exhalation that makes him wrinkle his nose. He’s got four weeks until his thesis is due and ten more pages to write and then three glorious weeks of reading over it, freaking out, wanting to rewrite it, rewriting large chunks of it and then sending it off in the vain hope that the end result won’t be an ejection from the history department. He’s too busy to remember someone’s name.  
  
“What is it then?” His cappuccino is a little cooler than he’d like but he doesn’t say anything. Rebecca is deadly with a steam wand. She calls the coffee machine -baby- of all things, and spends half her time upgrading it and giving it extra flashing lights and exhaust pipes or whatever.   
  
“Desmond. Desmond Miles.” She’s smiling at him like he’s done something to be proud of and he drinks his coffee, grumbles thanks and slinks back off to his seat.   
  
He can’t concentrate. He’s re-read the last sentence three times and his train of thought is shot, somewhere off with the army movements of the ancient Romans which has nothing to do with seventeenth century Florence. He winces, presses his face against his hands hard enough for his glasses to leave an imprint around his eyes and when Lucy wanders over to check on him (he doesn’t know why she does it, maybe he’ll never know) he doesn’t bother looking up.  
  
“You look tired.”  
  
Not Lucy. His head snaps up and his mouth opens and fuck, why can’t he not talk?  
  
“Who comes into work on their day off?”   
  
New guy (Desmond, Desmond Miles) laughs at him, leans back in the chair across from him and shrugs.   
  
“My life is boring and I’ve already fixed my bike.”  
  
“How boring your life is has absolutely nothing to do with me. Go away, I’m working.”  
  
“I can see that.”  
  
Smug bastard. The thing is, Shaun feels things start to slot into place with regards to his thesis and he doesn’t stop to ask why, how or when the smug little bastard sitting across from him actually became  helpful .   
  
—-  
  
Shaun doesn’t bother asking for coffee the next time he comes in. Instead, he flops down in his seat, closes his eyes and tries to pretend the world doesn’t exist.   
  
Desmond puts a coffee down in front of him anyway and slides into the seat across from him, chewing on something that looks like it’s supposed to be a sandwich.  
  
“Who died?”  
  
“My laptop.”  
  
There’s a moment of silence and when Shaun looks up, the guy actually looks stricken. “You didn’t lose your thesis, did you?”  
  
“No, no, that’s saved onto an external hard drive, I just need to-. Not look at it right now. Or you. Go away.”  
  
He’s quietly glad someone’s horror matches his own at the fact that his bloody computer upped and died on him, that he has to go into university every day for the next three weeks to get the bloody thing done and can’t come in for coffee anymore, and that thought seems to cross both their minds at the same time, because Shaun grabs his coffee and holds it to his chest and Desmond clears his throat.  
  
“So uh, I was heading over to the bar for work later, but if you want to come there’s free cocktails in it for you.”  
  
Why?  Shaun things, but “You’d better not poison the bloody things.” comes out of his mouth and the smile Desmond throws him is somewhere between warm and unreadable and fuck.  
  
Fuck.  
  
Lucy laughs at him when he complains at her, says that Desmond blackmailed him into saying yes with his face, says that he’s not going to go and she kicks him in the shin, pulls him over for a hug and whispers in his ear.  
  
“You’re allowed to go out and have fun.”   
  
No he’s not, he’s got his thesis to finish and he’s going to take to sleeping in the student’s lounge and showering in the toilet block he just knows it. Desmond packs up to leave for the day at one in the afternoon and Shaun finds himself pulled along in his wake.  
  
The bar is one of those old, creaky buildings that’s been given a new lease on life by a bunch of drunk teenagers desperately trying to appear older than they are. He could infer something from that but he doesn’t, because Desmond is rattling away to him about different kinds of bourbon and he’s actually learning something about old wooded versus new casked and by the time he’s sat at the bar with a whiskey in his hand, the darker man is busy charming everyone in the immediate vicinity.  
  
Shaun wants to smack him over the head for it, because that is not -fair-.   
  
He’s drunk and rambling about Leonardo Da’Vinci by the time ten pm rolls around; he’s staunchly refused any requests from prepubescent children to dance and he’s been hit on four times which, while gratifying, is distracting him from his discussions about panting in a country full of -wet- and he’s been sitting in the bar for eight and a half hours.  
  
Desmond takes his glass away from him, throws his jacket back on and holds out an arm for him to get up with.   
  
“Leave off.” He mutters and Desmond just laughs at him, the scar at the corner of his mouth pulling an in another life, he would’ve leaned in and kissed the smile from his face.   
  
In another life, he wasn’t standing there, staring while the stool seems to slide out from underneath him to make friends with the floor.  
  
“Oh, for- Come on then. Not far to my place, you can sleep it off.”  
  
___  
  
Shaun’s hangover is the work of the devil. The devil being Desmond motherfucking Miles, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a coffee out to him and being deceptively  nice , something which Shaun didn’t trust.  
  
“Mrph.”  
  
“You hog the blankets, just so you know.”    
  
Shaun ignores him in favour of coffee and curls on his side, the mug held near enough to his forehead that he can feel the heat. He doesn’t want to move.   
  
“You’re a pants barman.” He manages to mutter past his headache and when a packet of advil drops in front of his face, he whimpers. “Rubbish.”   
  
“I’ll pretend to care if you want. There’s toast in the kitchen when you’re ready.”  
  
Shaun doesn’t move until his coffee starts to go cold. He downs two of the advil and drinks his coffee and waits for his brain to kick back into gear. He still has all his clothes on bar his shoes, and he’s warm and comfortable and Desmond’s bed is far comfier than it has any right to be.  
  
“I have to go to work.” The apron’s hanging off Desmond’s hips, his shirt untucked a little at the side and Shaun looks right at his face, blinks blearily and nods. “You can let yourself out right?”  
  
“Sod off.”  
  
Desmond laughs at him and leans over to say something, the collar of his shirt wide open and Shaun figures that he can blame the hangover when he leans up and kisses him.  
  
They’re frozen, just for a moment. Desmond makes a sound like he’s been shot and suddenly Shaun has a lapful, his headache slamming into his forehead and Desmond’s mouth on his. He tastes like toothpaste and an afterhint of toast and Shaun groans, slides his hands up his shirt and tugs at it, fingers skittering over his skin.   
  
Desmond shoves him back against the bed and straddles his waist properly, his hands shoving up and under the jumper Shaun’s wearing, pulling grey and blue material out  of the way so he can get to his skin. Shaun pops buttons on his own shirt to get it off and they end up half-naked, clothes strewn on the floor.  
  
Desmond kisses like he’s dying. The scar on his mouth feels strange against his lips and Shaun can’t get enough of it. He slides his hands up into the other man’s short hair and tugs, pulls him down against him and the groan he gets in reward  shoots straight from his stomach down to his toes, makes him arch his hips up. It’s almost too much, and by the time they get their pants open they’re panting for it, Demond biting heavy, hard marks against his shoulder and he leans into it, grabs at his back and hauls him down against him.  
  
He comes grinding against his hip, Desmond’s dick heavy in his hand and he forgets how to breathe, how to make his fingers work. His heart hammers in his chest and his headache is back, heavy and snarling between his eyes and Desmond kisses his way up to his mouth, arms shaking with the effort of holding himself up.  
  
“I’m really, really late for work,” he mutters and Shaun shoves him off, half-amused.  
  
“Sod off then, prick.”  
  
Desmond doesn’t look like he knows whether to laugh or not but Shaun kisses him back when he leans in, which wipes some of the confusion off his face.  
  
—-  
  
For three weeks, he lives at college. He goes home to sleep and eventually stops doing that, because it takes away from his thesis writing time. Desmond checks on him once or twice and Shaun tries to let him know it’s nothing personal, that he just needs to get it finished and Desmond’s a distraction he can’t afford. When he’s around, he can’t think of anything else and it’s not  that he doesn’t like him, it’s sort of that he likes him too much.  
  
He doesn’t even realise he hasn’t seen another person (that’s not the librarian or tech support) for nearly a month until there’s a knock at his door and he crawls out of bed to answer it, He looks like hell, his glasses are hanging off his shirt and when he sees Lucy on the other side of the door he groans, hauls it open and braces himself.  
  
Lucy doesn’t hug him so much as violently assault him. “Where  have you -been-? We’ve been worried sick!” She does look worried, her eyes wide and her hair askew and he pats her, winces and takes a step back.   
  
“Ow, ow no attacking the postgrad.”  
  
She smacks him in the arm and scowls, shouldering her way into his apartment. “So, are you done with your thesis yet?”  
  
The thing is, he never thought he would, actually. He’d handed it in three hours ago, crawled back home to sleep the universe away and spent half an hour absolutely convinced he’d imagined the whole thing and had failed and christ, he was hyperventilating because what if he hadn’t handed it in at all what if he-  
  
Lucy smacked him again.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
“You’re welcome. Go have a shower, you’re coming with me.” He isn’t given a chance to protest and by the time he’s showered and dressed and actually doesn’t look like he’s been run over by a truck she’s called Rebecca, who takes him by the arm and hauls him outside and shoves his keys in his pocket.   
  
“Hi, Shaun! We’re kidnapping you, hope you don’t mind.”  
  
“Is it even kidnapping when you’re a recluse?” Lucy asks, letting Rebecca bundle Shaun into the car. He naps on the way to wherever they’re going, the girls whispered conversations lulling him to sleep and when they get there, Rebecca shakes his shoulder and smiles at him, strangely amused.  
  
“Come on, princess. Up we get.” The coffee shop is still open and bright and there’s a bunch of people in there, regulars he vaguely knows and he starts to back away when he sees Desmond at the counter, the apron slung low and his sleeves rolled up.   
  
“No, I’m busy, forgot to wash my hair-.”  
  
“Shut up, Shaun.” Rebecca’s merciless and they drag him in and Desmond looks up at him and smiles, like he’s genuinely fucking glad to see him or something and that’s the last straw.   
  
“What can I get you?” He smirks as if he already knows the answer and Shaun changes his order up just to piss him off.   
  
“Hot chocolate, shot of caramel.”   
  
Desmond’s eyebrow creeps even higher and the scar at the side of his mouth lifts, curls at the end and Shaun’s ears flush a bright red.   
  
“Need a change, huh?  
  
“Contemplating it.”


	2. The second

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their first real fight

Their first real fight is over Desmond bringing back a cat. He’s wanted a pet for years (he doesn’t talk about what he used to do, where he used to be before he became a bartender and coffee monkey and part time mechanic and he’s always working and never resting like if he stops he’ll die) and when he finally brings one back, it has to be while Shaun’s crashed out on his couch.  
  
The cat takes to him immediately. He’s nowhere near allergic but is sorely tempted to pretend when he wakes up with the animal curled at the base of his throat, his breath warm against it’s fur. The click and whirr of Desmond’s old, banged up camera wakes him further, his shirt rucked up over his hip, his classload far too large, his students too stupid to have left him with any patience.  
  
“Get this fucking thing off me.” Demsond puts down the camera and picks up the cat, his eyes narrowed as Shaun sits up, ungainly and tired.   
  
“What the hell’s your problem?”  
  
“I don’t need a cat sitting on my neck. I’ve got too much to do and you’re not helping in the /slightest/.” He knows it’s sort of irrational and he’s exhausted, not having an adult reaction at all. The cat climbs up Demond’s hoodie, leaving tiny claw-marks in the cotton and that makes him angry too because that’s what he wants to do. He wants to climb on him and hide and pretend the universe doesn’t exist and he doesn’t have three weeks of grading to do on top of picking up his own classes and he’s shouting before he realises it, the door slamming behind him as he sits on the toilet and snarls to himself, rubbing the space between his eyes where his glasses press too hard and leave tiny purple indents on his skin.  
  
He calms down after a while and sort of doesn’t want to leave the bathroom. He’s exhausted and embarrassed and he didn’t lock the door but Desmond leaves it closed anyway. He can see him in his mind’s eye, the tiny black cat huddled in his hood as he sat at the kitchen table and tried to figure out what he’d done wrong this time because Shaun was volatile when he was tired and he was /exhausted/ and just wanted to sleep for six years but he had grading to do and he wouldn’t let Desmond help, not with the two jobs he was holding down on his own.  
  
The thing was, when he left the bathroom he had the grading spread out on the table anyway.  
  
“What’re you doing?” His voice is scratchy and there’s one tan, scarred hand holding a cup of coffee out to him which he takes without a word.  
  
“You know half your students are idiots, right? There’s no way you can deny Collinson’s a Christian, not with the subject matter of the pre-raphaelite brotherood he was involved with, and you’ve got one little dick here likening his work to Picasso?”  
  
Shaun stares at him for a moment, usually spiked hair limp across his forehead as he held his cup of coffee halfway to his mouth.   
  
“I love you.”  
  
He just sort of blurts it and Desmond waves a hand at him, flapping the paper in the other as the cat peers over the edge of his hood, green eyes wide.   
  
Shaun scratches it behind the ears and sits down in the other chair.

“Idiots. I don’t know how you teach idiots. No wonder you’re pissy.”  
  
“Mood? Lost.” He’s smiling anyway, the crinkling at the corners of his eyes settling in with his first grey hair at his temple and Desmond rants away as he hooks his foot against one of Shaun’s under the table and bumps their knees together. 


End file.
